Iconic Movie Guns Traded for Thumbs in Viral Photoshop Meme

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Iconic Movie Guns Traded for Thumbs in Viral Photoshop Meme

The new Thumbs & Ammo blog started as a joke amongst friends in England, but when it hit the internet earlier this month it quickly became a viral hit.

Contributors photoshop guns out of famous movie stills, replacing them with a thumbs up. Tony Montana, Rambo, James Bond and the Terminator, among others, don't look so tough when all of a sudden they're sending messages of encouragement instead of unleashing a flurry of bullets.

"I'm just glad that people are enjoying it," says the blog's founder, who responded to Wired by e-mail but asked to remain anonymous because he says the blog was just supposed to be a friendly game. "I didn't think it would get this big."

The simple idea carries political undertones in the United States, where gun-safety laws are being reviewed by politicians and debated publicly. It draws attention to the prevalence of guns in our culture without any clear agenda.

"One of the things I like the most about T&A is that people are enjoying it in their own way. Some find it amusing because they recognize the movie and the actor and it makes them look funny," the founder wrote. For other people, he says, "it seems to resonate on a more political level, i.e. – it's anti-guns."

The founder says the original idea for the blog came from another Photoshop game where he and a group of friends from college would steal pictures of each other off Facebook, cut out the faces and then lay them over the tops of actor's bodies in movie stills.

That game eventually faded, but the founder says he was riding the subway in London with his girlfriend when they stopped in front of a poster for Welcome to the Punch, a British film starring James McAvoy. In the poster, the actor is holding a gun and "we realized how funny it would be if James McAvoy was just pointing and looking that serious," the founder says.

The next day he tried to photoshop Daniel Craig pointing instead of holding a gun. While searching for stock images to paste in, he found a picture of a thumbs up and thought that would be even better.

"I sent the Skyfall image [with the thumbs up] as an example round to all my mates with itchy Photoshop (mouse/Wacom) fingers. The humor and the friendly competition did the rest of the work. I had about 15 images by the next day," he says.

The name for the blog is a play on the magazine Guns & Ammo, and the header for the blog was purposely designed to resemble the logo of the magazine.

Since the initial batch of images went up, submissions have been pouring in. When we tried to e-mail the blog at one point, we got an automatic reply that read, in part, "If you've sent us an image it's now standing in a very long queue of awesomeness, waiting to see some action. We are grateful for your hard work and will try to post it up when we can."

Many of the most iconic movies and gun scenes have already been picked off. But we'll be curious to see how the blog grows and what obscure but well-placed thumbs-for-guns trades people will think of next. Leave us your suggestions in the comments.